Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself.
What do you know, the source is from a "my perfect resume" website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren't providing the details of the study, aren't providing a paper , aren't providing the methodology or questions asked, aren't providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the "conclusions" of their study.
So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was "81% posted fake jobs", that makes it true.
Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does.
Instantly lost interest in the "study" and the article based on it.
I've done tech interviewing for years. Job listing that are to various degree fake are quite common. Of course, fakeness comes in many flavor, from listings posted just to "see if there's anyone out there" (I had a boss who did this regularly) to jobs a supervisor really does want to fill but which they know they won't because the bureaucracy has forced impossible requirements on them. An example: "Junior programmer, 10 years experience in language X" (that's existed for five years).
This is another personal anecdote, but I had an interview earlier this year for a database related role. The job ad had a huge salary range and the interview had nothing to do with the role. I wasn't asked any behavioral or technical questions. The two people on the call just wanted to get to know me. We probably spent several minutes talking about sports. A few days later I got rejected. What the hell?
Just to note. 80% of recruiters doesn't mean 80% of ads. A recruiter that has posted thousands of legitimate ads in their career, technically only needs to have posted 1 fake one to be eligible for inclusion in the 80%.
Although I understand, and to some extent share, your skepticism regarding the "study", I have no problem conceiving that a trend might currently be setting around the practice of posting fake ads, for whatever reason. It doesn't require much. In an unregulated playing field, simple peer pressure and survival is all you need to drive everyone to shady practices.
So, the study might be moot, but the number isn't so surprising.
You probably need to pay to see their surveys, but even if you don't trust that: the bureau of labor has had to make huge adjustments all this year and last year. This isn't just some bad optics.
Unless I misunderstand you, you're citing a completely irrelevant factoid. Employment statistics are based on actual people working, not job ads posted. And the revisions [1] (which sometimes are upward) have nothing to do with ghost jobs, but are due to additional data coming in over time, leading to refinements of the original estimate[2].
Seems perfectly plausible that the phenomenon of ghost jobs is real and it may be getting worse.
But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for its data points and the author does nothing to investigate or challenge the quality of that data. This is not journalism. It looks like a PR piece for resume builder.
The Forbes article you linked is much more informative.
> Well I opened the article, near the beginning I saw the text: "81% of recruiters admitted to posting ads for positions that were fake or already filled."
I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.
The really common reason in my experience is there is a job that is made to fit a specific internal applicant but it has to advertised “because of process”. Often the manager is not even telling recruiting that they have already picked the candidate.
What about job postings for a position already held by an H1B visa holder?
What about job postings that are not taken down until a new hire is given the offer, agrees verbally, signs the paperwork, relocates and actually shows up on the job?
Many companies have policies requiring that all jobs have to be posted both internally and externally before being filled. The intent is to prevent Sam the VP from just slotting his buddy into the job. At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
> The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
H1B has evolved into a bizarre collaborative scam between the government and tech corporations; there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
It's an outrage once you work at these companies and behold the sheer dysfunction and they're all getting paid wages native American citizens would take.
> there is, in fact, a US citizen who can fill any software engineering role a US company has.
Right now I suspect you're probably right. But 2 or 3 years ago?
If you're right then why would companies want to go through all of the extra paperwork and hoops to hire an H1B right now? Maybe the answer is "they can pay less"? But I'm not sure if it's actually all that much less than they could pay someone who's been looking for work for six months to a year or more.
Bizarre? Supporting business's whims is mostly what the government has existed to do for the last forty years. What's bizarre is that people expect our country to function normally when this is so blatant.
Yes, there's been mild movement away from this insanity, but we're still miles to the right of what actually supports the people who live here.
Also back in the day, we would say we need X new staff, corporate would encourage us to advertise and interview, but when it came to extending and offer they would tell us we can't increase head count. Happened over and over till I left.
I have never started the interview process before there was a headcount approved[1]. I have never had anyone push back when I said "I'll worry about that when the headcount is approved, because I got things to do"; but then I can't recall more than a handful of times anyone wanted me to front-run the recruiting process with a fishing expedition. Have things really become that shitty?
[1] To be fair, sometimes the headcount disappeared for various reasons, but that's not the same as "meh...just have a look around and jerk some peoples chains".
In Europe jobs have to be published. Even if there is no intention of filling it from the public. And companies also publish bullshit jobs which are used to manipulate regulatory requirements if needed (eg. if you want to hire a foreigner, you must prove you couldn't fill the position locally - by publishing it for 3 months).
No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
> At the end of the day, Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
This has been true in any area of human activity since forever. If you have a choice to work with someone you know/worked with previously and someone completely new, who may or may not be as good as advertised... Who would you hire? When your future bonuses/promotions and maybe job itself depends on it?
This is all a function of interviews sucking right? Leet code is essentially completely independent from dev skill. Projects take too much commitment and time from the team and devs.
So, what option do teams have? Just hire the people that your good devs say are good is honestly the most effective practice that I've seen.
I've recently witnessed a situation where VP hired someone he used to work with This VP is not the best judge of talent. The guy barely does any work, and rarely responds to messages. He'll send me a scheduled slack at 8 AM. I reply. I don't hear from him all day. It's incredibly frustrating, since we had better candidates.
> but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it
I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut.
It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
For H1B/PERM, I remember they had to post it on the wall in a public place. Our company posted the jobs on the wall in the lunch room at our office. It has every information including the salary. I guess things have changed a bit since the early 2000s?
> Sam the VP is just going to slot his buddy into the job but now you made a whole bunch of people apply for a job that was never available to them.
...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.
I’m not shocked at all. Another issue is recruiters posting fake jobs and asking for references as step one. Soon as I say “I don’t provide references until the last step, and only to the company hiring” they hang up on me
Yea this is a weird one. Some job applications actually require me to fill in reference contact information. I can't submit the application without that detail. Of course, I try to skirt it.
Governments are one of the worst offenders when it comes to posting jobs which have already been basically handed to internal candidates. They do it for the same reason as everyone else: compliance with external regulations or internal rules.
Had one group request references at the beginning, checked them, then my references got to infer that I didn't get the job offer. In fact if I recall, that group ghosted me, leaving me to infer as well.
But then later another group asked me for references at the beginning, I declined to provide them, and then they were okay with proceeding through the interview process.
Maybe it would work in the general case to always reply to such a request with "some previous group ghosted me, and so I've vowed to withhold the references until later in the process."?
Personally, I find needing to provide references at all to be akin to me needing to get my parents permission. It makes my skin crawl and I will actively screen jobs that require them. The process feels demeaning and dehumanizing. Then you have to bother people who don't really know you anymore and beg them to waste their time on someone else's BS.
i have friends that i worked with, who would gladly be a reference, and i would not mind them doing it, but really, at best they could confirm that i am a nice person to work with. and i would never use anyone as a reference who would not do that. so the whole thing feels rather meaningless.
but that's not the only thing. in germany it is common to ask for written reference letters which are called "arbeitszeugnis" (work report card, like the report card you get from school). that term makes me feel like i was a kid. it clearly establishes a hierarchy. i am the lowly subordinate employee and you are the superior employer that i am to look up to. it gets really wierd when i consider that i have been on the other side as an employer myself. (and by law these letters must be honest and may not contain unfounded negative statements which makes employers avoid writing anything negative because they could get sued.)
and then there are places who ask for actual school report cards or at least grade averages or want to know how i did in math in school, as if that was in any way useful to understand how i would do as a programmer decades later.
Yeah, I'll provide peers, but absolutely not seniors/management references. One of them very purposefully has no social media footprint and I'm not going to cross that line because of some recruiter call that almost never goes nowhere.
I'd love to go back to times where it was fine for a candidate not to have a LinkedIn. Currently, regardless of your blog, or your multiple StackOverflow answers, or your GitHub, or your posts on any of the other tech-focused communities, if HR doesn't see your LinkedIn, it's as if you're off-planet.
The tech field is centered around skills. You're under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you're looking for work and you're done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix?
It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having really tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don't particularly care about you as a tech worker. They don't even understand you or your skillset. You're a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they'll gladly inform you that you're missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever...
Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an "Intermediate position" just tells me that no one in charge cares.
Hi, I never had a LinkedIn account or profile. Been working professionally for more than 15 years. It’s a good way to avoid distractions. You might miss on being told about opportunities, but other than that, are you sure you’re being cancelled for not having one?
When I interview, I often ask the recruiter to share the cv, portfolio, and GitHub/other. As they often just share a LinkedIn URL but that’s up to the interviewer and team to decide if enough to compromise theirs and the candidates time.
Absolutely. And a lot of spam. A few months ago there was a little flame war between a few people. Company posted an ad and someone replied "this is spam, and you don't respond, just keep posting the same ad", and the company replied "no, I own the company and hand write this job ad every month to fit our future needs" which was patently a lie (exact same headcount, exact same three positions, every month for the last eight months, and usually a byte-accurate copy of each posting), and several similar.
Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
It's against the rules to call out hiring companies in the thread, primarily because we don't want off-topic arguments and because it would be too easy to exploit it for shenanigans.
But since people have been increasingly saying that this is a problem, let's do something about it. My current thought is to add a new instruction at the top asking companies to please only post in the thread if they're committed to responding to every applicant. Other suggestions for addressing this issue are welcome!
Edit: since the next Who Is Hiring day is tomorrow, let's get precise. I'm including this text at the top of the thread:
NEW RULE: Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
Could this be a case where companies have a "people-ops" person who needs to justify their position even though the company hasn't hired anyone in months? So they create some new OKRs like: "Get 20 qualified candidates vetted and ranked in case we do decide to hire someone.", "Create 40 job ads" or something?
It wasn't just them, but another dozen or so YC startups who've been around for many years and always keep a job ad in the queue. It's not their fault for doing that—it's my fault for neglecting the HN job ad system for too long. I get that the community doesn't like seeing the same ads over and over for the same few, long-established companies.
We recently changed the HN /jobs page to gradually reduce the frequency of those. Newer startups, who by definition haven't been around long enough to have had many posts, should be significantly better represented. The system has been designed to favor them for a long time, but it's favoring them more now.
Also along with ghost jobs do we have ghost candidates? Every job posting on LinkedIn have hundred plus applicants within the first two hours. Maybe many of the applicants are not eligible but this phenomenon points to a massive increase in labor supply for tech jobs. Automation and opening up competition globally is gutting out most of the tech jobs it seems.
The candidates are real. But The qualifications often aren't. Even if you post a job being full time on-site, you'll get applicants who are not even in the same country looking for remote work.
I feel that was the natural conclusion of a system where "requirements" are as realistic as a unicorn. But we're all suffering from that
Last I applied to a job posted on Who's Hiring, they had me fill a self recorded video interview on some platform. And do some coding exercise with screen sharing. Then send it to them. I've never gotten any sort of reply back, positive or negative. Felt like a clown. Won't be using that again.
Don’t use LinkedIn or Monster or Indeed. You’re better off searching on Google with “ inurl:careers” and finding positions these companies are directly hiring for.
Agree. Plus recruiters also sometimes reach out. There is quite a high signal to noise as always, but, it can be worth it. You don't need to engage in all the influencer crap at all, just ignore that and use it to be found by recruiters and to see some open positions.
Or Dice. Dice is just a spam magnet for "I know you're a PM in Washington looking for remote roles, but we have this two month onsite Kubernetes contract in Indiana, can we talk?"
I got one the other day asking if I'd take a down leveling and move to Korea for a six month contract even though my profile says I only accept permanent remote roles
There is benefit to being an active participant in your job search. I don't depend on anyone for employment, as self-employment is ALWAYS an option if you're serious about longevity and profit ($$$).
Honestly, the ideal approach if you're going for traditional W-2 steady paycheck employment job is:
- recruiters/people already approach you. This works when you build your network and reputation.
- use your network of trusted/worked-with-previously recruiters for leads.
- fend for yourself in the murky depths of the scummy internet full of low-life tactics reference farming, resume scraping, and G*d knows else happens when you participate in a public forum.
Real question: did you really want that job or was this just a +1 for your gamified job search? I think quality searches yield quality results.
Did you have previous experience when you became self-employed? I'm strongly considering this but I feel that I haven't had enough experience in the 9-5s. I also really need steady income in the near future to pay off loans.
This wasn't thought of when false advertising laws were drafted. California:
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
The language is broad, but they didn't cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.
> We leave this role posted because it's so critical to our operation and onboard as demand requires, however at this time we don't have enough demand to justify another full time hire.
Readit News
Instantly that felt completely insane to me, my bullshit detector went off the chart, so since they provided a source, I followed up on the source to see the evidence for myself.
What do you know, the source is from a "my perfect resume" website that apparently conducted a study on the issue, but they aren't providing the details of the study, aren't providing a paper , aren't providing the methodology or questions asked, aren't providing any details whatsoever, the only thing they provide is the "conclusions" of their study.
So, apparently because this random website supposedly conducted a study, and they say the result was "81% posted fake jobs", that makes it true.
Hey, I also conducted a study, and 14% posted fake jobs. There, my claim has just as much backing as theirs does.
Instantly lost interest in the "study" and the article based on it.
Although I understand, and to some extent share, your skepticism regarding the "study", I have no problem conceiving that a trend might currently be setting around the practice of posting fake ads, for whatever reason. It doesn't require much. In an unregulated playing field, simple peer pressure and survival is all you need to drive everyone to shady practices.
So, the study might be moot, but the number isn't so surprising.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/karadennison/2023/11/27/how-gho...
You probably need to pay to see their surveys, but even if you don't trust that: the bureau of labor has had to make huge adjustments all this year and last year. This isn't just some bad optics.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm [2] https://thedispatch.com/article/jobs-report-revisions-explai...
But this SF Gate piece is dumb. The article has one source for its data points and the author does nothing to investigate or challenge the quality of that data. This is not journalism. It looks like a PR piece for resume builder.
The Forbes article you linked is much more informative.
I love San Francisco to death, but there's no reliable local newspaper. It drives me nuts.
What about job postings that are not taken down until a new hire is given the offer, agrees verbally, signs the paperwork, relocates and actually shows up on the job?
Same thing happens with H1B/PERM, except now it's the law requiring it rather than company policy. The company already has someone doing the job today, but legally they have to post the job and interview a certain number of candidates to prove there is no US citizen that can do it.
Terrible situation for all involved.
Posted obscurely in a corner of the cafeteria, but exposing my salary to anyone who cared to look. They were never going to hire someone else, and we all knew it, but the charade had to be played.
Right now I suspect you're probably right. But 2 or 3 years ago?
If you're right then why would companies want to go through all of the extra paperwork and hoops to hire an H1B right now? Maybe the answer is "they can pay less"? But I'm not sure if it's actually all that much less than they could pay someone who's been looking for work for six months to a year or more.
Deleted Comment
Yes, there's been mild movement away from this insanity, but we're still miles to the right of what actually supports the people who live here.
[1] To be fair, sometimes the headcount disappeared for various reasons, but that's not the same as "meh...just have a look around and jerk some peoples chains".
No. If you publish it, you have to give an estimation of the salary, but that's the only limitation, at least in my country. Companies have internal guidelines, like in mine, you can't hire a relative to your own department, but the job i got wasn't on a public listing, it's my agent who gave my CV to my current team leader, he was interested, organized an itw, then 3 month later i hoped to my current job (and i am way better for it).
Nowadays, in tech, it's all about who you know rather than what you know.
So, what option do teams have? Just hire the people that your good devs say are good is honestly the most effective practice that I've seen.
I've got my first job after moving countries in Europe, despite this (very similar but it was 6 weeks IIRC) limitation being in place by law, within a week. Consulting body shop through which I was billing per day, and the umbrella company took 20% cut.
It seems its trivial to circumvent this kind of rule across the globe, and TBH what kind of state employee team would go over every single foreign first hire in given region, all the evidence and check its validity, gather all the details. Heck police ignore smaller crimes below certain threshold, states have no real processing power to handle this well.
...except now the recruiting and HR can report these candidates and interviews on their metrics, candidates had a hope of finding a job, and Sam has a bulletproof explanation in case if anybody asks why his buddy was hired. Win-win-win.
Is this normal?
The amount of spam and fake jobs on LI + other major sites is just disgusting and is ripe for government to come in and crack some heads.
But then later another group asked me for references at the beginning, I declined to provide them, and then they were okay with proceeding through the interview process.
Maybe it would work in the general case to always reply to such a request with "some previous group ghosted me, and so I've vowed to withhold the references until later in the process."?
but that's not the only thing. in germany it is common to ask for written reference letters which are called "arbeitszeugnis" (work report card, like the report card you get from school). that term makes me feel like i was a kid. it clearly establishes a hierarchy. i am the lowly subordinate employee and you are the superior employer that i am to look up to. it gets really wierd when i consider that i have been on the other side as an employer myself. (and by law these letters must be honest and may not contain unfounded negative statements which makes employers avoid writing anything negative because they could get sued.)
and then there are places who ask for actual school report cards or at least grade averages or want to know how i did in math in school, as if that was in any way useful to understand how i would do as a programmer decades later.
The tech field is centered around skills. You're under pressures to keep them sharp and up to date. When you're looking for work and you're done polishing the resume, updating the blog posts, doing your leetcode drills, do you really want to add playing LinkedIn games to the mix?
It seems to me that tech workers would benefit from having really tech-focused job networks. Not these hybrid platforms. LinkedIn, Indeed, and friends. They don't particularly care about you as a tech worker. They don't even understand you or your skillset. You're a backend dev with many years of OOP, FP, Agile, Kanban, Python, Go, SQL, JavaScript, and a slew of other relevant skills for the job, but they'll gladly inform you that you're missing a few skills to better match the list in the ad: go-getter, team-player, positive-attitude. Ok, sure, whatever...
Another thing, seeing an ad that asks for Python, Go, Node.js, SQL, React, Terraform, Kubernetes as an "Intermediate position" just tells me that no one in charge cares.
When I interview, I often ask the recruiter to share the cv, portfolio, and GitHub/other. As they often just share a LinkedIn URL but that’s up to the interviewer and team to decide if enough to compromise theirs and the candidates time.
Not to mention it's "discouraged" to call employers out on poor behavior. I know of at least three companies who post pretty steadily who ghosted at final rounds or in one case, "We intend to present a written offer" (though in "fairness", they did eventually inform me that they'd decided to freeze hiring, well, nearly three months later).
But since people have been increasingly saying that this is a problem, let's do something about it. My current thought is to add a new instruction at the top asking companies to please only post in the thread if they're committed to responding to every applicant. Other suggestions for addressing this issue are welcome!
Edit: since the next Who Is Hiring day is tomorrow, let's get precise. I'm including this text at the top of the thread:
NEW RULE: Please only post a job in this thread if you are committed to responding to everyone who applies.
Thoughts?
Edit per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42011360: "Please only post a job if you intend to fill a position and are committed to responding to everyone who applies."
We recently changed the HN /jobs page to gradually reduce the frequency of those. Newer startups, who by definition haven't been around long enough to have had many posts, should be significantly better represented. The system has been designed to favor them for a long time, but it's favoring them more now.
I feel that was the natural conclusion of a system where "requirements" are as realistic as a unicorn. But we're all suffering from that
So LinkedIn approximates (lots of people), not just (people hoping to get hired). If you're hiring, the former is a more talented pool to hire from.
Honestly, the ideal approach if you're going for traditional W-2 steady paycheck employment job is:
- recruiters/people already approach you. This works when you build your network and reputation. - use your network of trusted/worked-with-previously recruiters for leads. - fend for yourself in the murky depths of the scummy internet full of low-life tactics reference farming, resume scraping, and G*d knows else happens when you participate in a public forum.
Real question: did you really want that job or was this just a +1 for your gamified job search? I think quality searches yield quality results.
17500. It is unlawful for any person, firm, corporation or association, or any employee thereof with intent directly or indirectly to dispose of real or personal property or to perform services, professional or otherwise, or anything of any nature whatsoever or to induce the public to enter into any obligation relating thereto, to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated before the public in this state, or to make or disseminate or cause to be made or disseminated from this state before the public in any state, in any newspaper or other publication, or any advertising device, or by public outcry or proclamation, or in any other manner or means whatever, including over the Internet, any statement, concerning that real or personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, or concerning any circumstance or matter of fact connected with the proposed performance or disposition thereof, which is untrue or misleading, and which is known, or which by the exercise of reasonable care should be known, to be untrue or misleading, or for any person, firm, or corporation to so make or disseminate or cause to be so made or disseminated any such statement as part of a plan or scheme with the intent not to sell that personal property or those services, professional or otherwise, so advertised at the price stated therein, or as so advertised. Any violation of the provisions of this section is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment in the county jail not exceeding six months, or by a fine not exceeding two thousand five hundred dollars ($2,500), or by both that imprisonment and fine.
The language is broad, but they didn't cover the case of ads where no transaction was even contemplated. This is a bug.
Posting ghost jobs is a deceptive act.
> We leave this role posted because it's so critical to our operation and onboard as demand requires, however at this time we don't have enough demand to justify another full time hire.
HR is just PR with a different audience.